When the alarm clock went off in her parents’ bedroom, one door over from hers, it wasn’t the usual cruel morning sound but a promise of everything the day ahead might hold. When she heard the faint buzz of her father’s shaver and the footsteps of her mother in the hallway, she was amazed she’d never noticed, until today, how precious ordinary life was and how lucky she was to be a part of it. So much goodness. Other people were good. She herself was good. She felt goodwill to all mankind.
If she nevertheless waited, before getting out of bed, until the family car had whinnied to life in the driveway and her mother had come upstairs to dress, it was because she wanted to prolong her aloneness in the aftermath. She knotted herself into the Japanese silk robe that Shirley had bought her and soundlessly, in her bare feet, went down to the first-floor bathroom. The person who sat down to pee was a woman a man had kissed. Afraid of finding the change as invisible from the outside as it felt momentous from within, she avoided the eyes of this person in the mirror.
The aftersmell of toast and eggs deflected her away from the kitchen and back up to her room. It seemed as if her stomach was fluttering because she had a thousand things to begin all at once, but the only thing she could actually think of doing was to tell someone that she’d been kissed. She wanted to tell her brother first, but he wasn’t home from college yet. She stood at her front window and watched a squirrel angrily send another squirrel scrambling up the trunk of an oak tree. Maybe it was a matter of a stolen acorn, or maybe her mind just went there because she herself had stolen. The nervousness in her stomach was partly a thief’s adrenaline. For a moment, the aggressor squirrel seemed content to let the matter drop, but then the conflict escalated—hot pursuit up the trunk, further pursuit horizontally, a flying leap into the bushes by the driveway.
She wondered if he was awake yet, what he was thinking about her, whether he had regrets.
Outside her door, Judson was afoot and speaking to her mother about sugar cookies. Becky didn’t enjoy the domestic arts and was grateful to have a brother who did, especially in December, when her mother had the burden of upholding certain traditions, like the manufacture of sugar cookies in the shape of Christmas trees and candy canes, that she’d invented for the family. As far as Becky could tell, the holidays to her mother were just another chore, and it appeared that her own new feeling of goodwill was somewhat abstract, because it would have been a kindness to go and sit in the kitchen, maybe help with the cookies, and she didn’t want to.
By way of compromise, she dressed in her best, faded jeans and took her application materials down to the living room （the only person she was actively avoiding, Perry, was unlikely to appear before noon） and set up camp in the armchair by the Christmas tree, whose decoration was another of her mother’s chores. Its scent recalled the frenzy that she and Clem as kids had whipped each other into when presents piled up beneath it; but now she was so much older. The light in the windows was somber, the sounds of cookie-making strangely distant. She might have been sitting in some far-northern place that smelled of conifers. In the kiss’s aftermath, she seemed to be watching herself from a point so elevated that she could see the earth’s curvature, the world newly three-dimensional and spreading out in all directions from her armchair.
She was applying to six colleges, five of them private and expensive. As recently as October, college catalogues had been objects of romance, variously flavored promises of escape from a family she’d outgrown and a school whose social possibilities she’d exhausted. But then she’d discovered Crossroads, which had lessened her impatience to leave New Prospect, and now, as she opened the folder of applications, she found that the kiss had foreshortened the future more drastically. Anything beyond the coming day seemed irrelevant.
Tell us about a person you admire or have learned something important from.
She removed the tooth-dented cap of a Bic pen and started writing in a spiral notebook. Her handwriting, its upright pudginess, struck her as childish this morning. She scratched it out and tried to make it leaner and more slanting, more forward, more like the woman she’d felt herself to be the night before, in the parking lot behind the Grove.
The person I most admire is
My family lived in Southern Indiana until I was eight. My father was the pastor of two small rural parishes. It was farm country but there were woods and creeks to explore with my brother Clem. Unlike most brothers, Clem never got angry if I followed him. Clem wasn’t afraid of anything. He taught me to stand still if a bee was bothering me. He liked all kinds of critters. He called animals “critters” and was curious about all of them. One day he scooped up a big spider and let it crawl on him and then asked if he could put it on my arm. I learned that spiders don’t bite if you don’t threaten them. There was a log over a deep creek that Clem ran across like it was nothing. He showed me how to cross the creek by sitting on the log and scooching along. I think most brothers would have been happy to leave their little sister behind, but not Clem. He had a baseball glove he